By Ryan Hedrick
Every year ILS students cast their nets in search of internships that can offer up valuable experience in their desired fields. This year was no different. We caught up with two ILS students, Mary Kate McConahay and Mohit Tuli, to discuss their internship experiences and what they learned on the job.
McConahay, who is pursuing her MLS, decided to stay close to home when she took an internship with IU’s Center for Documentary Research and Practice. The CDRP is a unit within the Media School that brings together nonfiction media projects. While mostly focused on the oral history archives, McConahay said her internship has exposed her to a lot of different work, and allowed her to experience how much goes into making an accurate archive.
“No day has been the same, which has been surprising. I thought I would do a lot more filing and grunt work that interns do. But that has not been the case. I’ve felt like a true member of the team,” said McConahay.
Tuli is an MIS student and had a similarly enjoyable experience with his internship last summer at Johnson & Johnson. He worked remotely with teams in San Diego and New Jersey as part of the corporation’s pharmaceutical division. His work focused on helping to implement deep learning models to review endoscopic videos to better detect ulcerative colitis and other inflammatory bowel diseases.
“It was really heavy research oriented work that involved a lot of coding and literature review,” Tuli said. “It was a really good team too. My manager was an amazing person and we coordinated with people from Howard and MIT. So it was nice networking as well.”
McConahay and Tuli are both set to graduate this May. Both students said they are very pleased with their internships and the work they were able to contribute to, and are excited about their next chapters.